Lauren Davidson

Posts by Lauren Davidson

Jennine Capó Crucet reads a passage from her novel Magic City Relic at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

Jennine Capó Crucet is the author of How to Leave Hialeah, winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, the John Gardner Book Prize, and the Devil’s Kitchen Award in Prose. A recipient of an O. Henry Prize and a Bread Loaf Fellow, her work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, Epoch, Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, and other magazines. After working in South Central LA as a counselor to first-generation college students, she is now an assistant professor at Florida State University.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available on iTunesU. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.

Melinda Moustakis was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and raised in California. Her debut collection, Bear Down Bear North: Alaska Stories(University of Georgia Press, 2011) won the Flannery O’ Connor Award in Short Fiction and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her story “They Find the Drowned” won a PEN/O.Henry award.

Her work has also appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Conjunctions, American Short Fiction, and elsewhere. She was named a 5 Under 35 writer by the National Book Foundation and was a Hodder Fellow at The Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University. She received a 2014 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship and is a 2014-2016 Kenyon Review Fellow in Fiction at Kenyon College.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available on iTunesU. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.

Carl Phillips reads from his book of poetry, Double Shadow, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. He is a frequent contributor to NER, most recently with his essay “Beautiful Dreamer” in NER 35.2, and in 35.1 with his poems “Spring” and “By Force.”

August 19, 2012

Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Silverchest (2013), Double Shadow (2011), and Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006 (2007). His 2004 collection, The Rest of Love, won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available on iTunesU. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.

Bruce Snider reads two of his poems from his book Paradise, Indiana at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference on August 21, 2012.

“Map”

“The Smoke”

Snider is the author of Paradise, Indiana,winner of the 2011 Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, and The Year We Studied Women, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and Gettysburg Review. He was a Wallace Stegner fellow, a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, and a Jenny McKean Moore Fellow at George Washington University. He currently teaches at the University of San Francisco.

All Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference readings are available on iTunesU. To hear more, please visit the Bread Loaf website.

Maria Hummel’s short story “No Others Before Me” appeared in NER 31.2:

Laura’s labor was long and difficult, not because it was hard to squeeze the villagers out, but because several of them tried to climb back in. After their town finally collapsed into a mud of placental fluid around them, they sat in the muck, rubbing their skinny arms. They submitted to being prodded by the doctors and lay listlessly on the mattress while Laura and I cooed at them.

“Give them as much body contact as possible,” advised the nurse. So we spread them out like Christmas ornaments all over Laura’s naked belly and thighs. They curled. They sighed. Then finally one fellow reared his head and pronounced his new world cold and inhospitable. He told the others that they were being punished for exploiting their paradise in the womb.

“It’s okay, little guy,” Laura said, in a voice I had never heard before. It was gentle and singsong and full of authority. She guided the man toward her breasts. “It’s okay.

After a good feed, he revised his opinion and called out to his brethren about a land of milk and honey. Laura pulled the others to her and they waited their turn in a cranky huddle.

“See?” she said to me, her eyes glistening with tears.

I nodded. I saw. They needed her. All that tugging and sucking. All those itty-bitty sounds. This was what my beautiful wife had wanted: to be everything to them. And my job was to make it possible for her.

I drove them home in three car-seats, each with eight snug pockets where the villagers rode and tossed their arms at their mama.

I imagined Albinna trolling the aisles of the dime store, the sleeves on a denim jacket her brother’d outgrown rolled over her thin wrists. The saleswomen, older than our mothers, sweaters around their shoulders cape-like, would follow after her expecting her to pocket lip gloss or musk, things she fingered or picked up to smell. There was nothing she thought of stealing. But who else would have known that about her?

I stopped going places without her. I felt a generous love for her and for myself loving her. When she couldn’t go somewhere because she was ironing curtains, she’d been out that day already, she had to get lettuce at the store, I stayed home, my mother asking: Where’s Albinna today?

We’d found a rusting truck cap in a back field and dragged an old coffee table into it. She brought a candle and once we tried cigarettes there. Days without her, I’d sit there myself, bring the dog, find something to use as a vase and fill it with wild chamomile.

You could ask another friend over, my mother said, but I had no wish to do that.

Then one night she showed up alone, and sat down next to him, and said Hi, in English, in an accent he knew wasn’t Russian. By the time her friends came, he’d been talking to her for an hour. He was nice to them, her fellow language-school students, even the over-polite German guy whose heart she was obviously breaking. He bought them a couple of rounds of beers. She ignored the group. The few times they came in after that, they sat by themselves, and talked more quietly than before, without laughing so much.

Her drink hasn’t come. He motions to Yasha, who’s settling up with some guys at the other end of the bar. Yasha nods.

Last Friday, they were sitting right here, at just this time, 2:30, looking at one another in a way they’d grown accustomed to, at the ends of nights, a little drunk, giddy, knowing that in a few minutes they’d be in the back of a cab, kissing, as they sped through the nineteenth-century streets, and in ten minutes they’d wake the night watchman at her place, knocking on the grimy glass door with a ruble coin, giggling as he stumbled toward them to open up, and then they’d ride up in the rickety elevator, kissing some more, she stroking his neck and the close-cropped hair on the back of his head, his hands resting on the soft skin around her waist, and then they’d get to the top floor and go into her apartment and she’d drop her keys on the kitchen table and lead him to the living-room window, where they’d undress one another, slowly, still kissing, by the light of the moon, the sleeping city spread below them.

Room 404, an interdisciplinary magazine with an emphasis on design, will release its first print issue this week. Conceived, edited, and designed by current Middlebury students, this magazine features “projects that don’t quite fit in any other publications at Middlebury,” according to Moss Turpan, who co-edits the magazine with Dylan Redford.

“The first issue,” Turpan says, “includes a series of logos for things that don’t need logos, a piece about using art as a tool for processing academic ideas (accompanied by a series of illustrations telling the tale of ancient Greek history), and an essay on the way the aesthetics of dorm rooms affect one’s life.”

Room 404 collaborates with its contributors, who come up with rough ideas for projects and develop them with the magazine’s managing board.

Free copies of the first issue are available by emailing room404@middlebury.edu. A release party is scheduled on campus for Wednesday, January 16, at 8 p.m.

The Literary MagNet column in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine praises New England Review for its design and quality along with Cave Wall, 6×6, Big Fiction, and The Paris Review. Travis Kurowski writes: “For over thirty years, the New England Review, housed at Middlebury College in Vermont, has been producing elegant, intricately designed print magazine.” Poets & Writers also recently included NER in its online feature by Jamie FitzGerald on “Twenty-Five Literary Magazine Twitter Feeds to Follow.”

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A Snail's Pace | Corinne Purtill

In January 1941, after a lifetime of abdominal pains, Henri Matisse readied himself for an operation to remove fourteen inches of his ruined colon. Prudently, given the risks of radical surgery in prewar France, he also prepared to die. Amid the letters and bequests, he expressed to his doctors a wish for three more years of life—the time needed, he believed, “to bring my work to a conclusion.”
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